'Woman is the promise that cannot be kept,' said the poet Paul Claudel.
But does she know that? She - her sexuality, her voice and eyes and skin and hair - is the promise that we men make to ourselves hour after hour every day, every day of our lives. If she is not the secret of the universe, then there is none. To us she appears in the clandestine and burning center of the mind as the form we most deeply desire and must create or die. There she is - dressed, or half-dressed, in her mysterious clothes, hair a little mussed, lips just moist enough; and from going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it - the real earth, and not just the enchanted fragment of it that blazes in the longing mind to furnish her setting - she becomes a hidden archetype to the beholder rendered godlike by her presence: his possession and promise, soulless and soulful at the same time, receding, flashing up with terrible certainty at the most inopportune times that she then makes opportune. Behind her are real women, giving to the ideal the substance it requires from the lived world, and serving to make more powerful and imperious those all-powerful creatures of the depths of our being, the slaves of our needs who enslave us. We have seen her in actual beds, and seen her satisfactions taking place hiddenly, deep in the body, from outward signs so powerful and intimate that we know, with awe and gratitude, that we could never attain anything of like consequence, or even approach it. We leave her sleeping, and retire to the center of the mind, where she has taken a new dimension, another hairdo, another set of magic lingerie. We love her there in another one of her endless changes, and wonder when she will come true again, taking on the mortal and identifying flesh without which all ideals die, as a real woman, perhaps not yet encountered, unhooks her bra with the strange motion that only women have ever mastered, smiling with infinite complicity.
James Dickey

thanks again to Whiskey River